Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself

Choosing fewer things so I can love each of them more deeply.

Doing more

For those of us who feel deeply, who can tune into the needs of others almost effortlessly - the impulse to do more, hold more, take on more, is not a personal failing. It's what happens when gifts go without a container.

In the proverbial village, someone would have looked at you and said: this is yours to hold. And just as importantly, you would have looked around and seen others holding their pieces. You would have known the rest was in good hands. You would have been free to let it go.

Without that wider view, we can end up trying to carry weight that was never ours — not because we're disorganised or lack boundaries, but because we genuinely cannot see that others are already carrying it. The overwhelm isn't about workload. It's about orientation. It's about not having been given back a clear enough picture of where we fit.

The money dimension of this is real too. When we try to do too much, we tend to charge too little - spreading ourselves across more than we can sustain, underpricing everything because none of it feels quite like the thing. Choosing fewer things isn't just a wellbeing practice. It's an economic one.

But to choose fewer things with genuine confidence, you need to be seen first. You need a mirror that reflects your specific contribution back to you clearly enough that you can say: this, not that. This is mine. That can be someone else's.

We need to see - and be seen - to know which fewer things are truly ours to choose.

Work Your Brilliance is a daily publication for people living the uncommon art of being paid to be themselves.